The Golden Slipper | Page 7

"How you have deceived me! Whoever would
have thought you to be the one to play the mischief!"
Who indeed! Of all the five, she was the one who was considered
absolutely immune from suspicion ever since the night Mrs. Barnum's
handkerchief had been taken, and she not in the box. Eyes which had
surveyed Miss Driscoll askance now rose in wonder toward hers, and
failed to fall again because of the stoniness into which her
delicately-carved features had settled.
"Miss West, I know you will be glad to remove your gloves; Miss
Strange certainly has a right to know her special tormentor," spoke up
her host in as natural a voice as his great relief would allow.
But the cold, half-frozen woman remained without a movement. She
was not deceived by the banter of the moment. She knew that to all of
the others, if not to Peter Strange's odd little daughter, it was the thief
who was being spotted and brought thus hilariously to light. And her
eyes grew hard, and her lips grey, and she failed to unglove the hands
upon which all glances were concentrated.
"You do not need to see my hands; I confess to taking the pendant."
"Caroline!"
A heart overcome by shock had thrown up this cry. Miss West eyed her
bosom-friend disdainfully.
"Miss Strange has called it a jest," she coldly commented. "Why should
you suggest anything of a graver character?"

Alicia brought thus to bay, and by one she had trusted most, stepped
quickly forward, and quivering with vague doubts, aghast before
unheard-of possibilities, she tremulously remarked:
"We did not sleep together last night. You had to come into my room to
get my slippers. Why did you do this? What was in your mind,
Caroline?"
A steady look, a low laugh choked with many emotions answered her.
"Do you want me to reply, Alicia? Or shall we let it pass?"
"Answer!"
It was Mr. Driscoll who spoke. Alicia had shrunk back, almost to
where a little figure was cowering with wide eyes fixed in something
like terror on the aroused father's face.
"Then hear me," murmured the girl, entrapped and suddenly desperate.
"I wore Alicia's slippers and I took the jewels, because it was time that
an end should come to your mutual dissimulation. The love I once felt
for her she has herself deliberately killed. I had a lover--she took him. I
had faith in life, in honour, and in friendship. She destroyed all. A
thief-- she has dared to aspire to him! And you condoned her fault. You,
with your craven restoration of her booty, thought the matter cleared
and her a fit mate for a man of highest honour."
"Miss West,"--no one had ever heard that tone in Mr. Driscoll's voice
before, "before you say another word calculated to mislead these ladies,
let me say that this hand never returned any one's booty or had anything
to do with the restoration of any abstracted article. You have been
caught in a net, Miss West, from which you cannot escape by
slandering my innocent daughter."
"Innocent!" All the tragedy latent in this peculiar girl's nature blazed
forth in the word. "Alicia, face me. Are you innocent? Who took the
Dempsey corals, and that diamond from the Tiffany tray?"

"It is not necessary for Alicia to answer," the father interposed with not
unnatural heat. "Miss West stands self- convicted."
"How about Lady Paget's scarf? I was not there that night."
"You are a woman of wiles. That could be managed by one bent on an
elaborate scheme of revenge."
"And so could the abstraction of Mrs. Barnum's five-hundred- dollar
handkerchief by one who sat in the next box," chimed in Miss Hughson,
edging away from the friend to whose honour she would have pinned
her faith an hour before. "I remember now seeing her lean over the
railing to adjust the old lady's shawl."
With a start, Caroline West turned a tragic gaze upon the speaker.
"You think me guilty of all because of what I did last night?"
"Why shouldn't I."
"And you, Anna?"
"Alicia has my sympathy," murmured Miss Benedict.
Yet the wild girl persisted.
"But I have told you my provocation. You cannot believe that I am
guilty of her sin; not if you look at her as I am looking now."
But their glances hardly followed her pointing finger. Her friends--the
comrades of her youth, the Inseparables with their secret oath--one and
all held themselves aloof, struck by the perfidy they were only just
beginning to take in. Smitten with despair, for these girls were her life,
she gave one wild leap and sank on her knees before Alicia.
"O speak!" she began. "Forgive me, and--"
A tremble seized her throat; she ceased to speak and let